Maggie Fox NBC News
School officials in an area near New Orleans have shut off water fountains and stocked up on hand sanitizer this week after a brain-eating amoeba killed a 4-year-old boy and was found thriving in the local tap water system.
Water officials say they are “shocking” the St. Bernard Parish system with chlorine to try to kill off the parasite and get the water back up to a safe standard. And while health experts say the water is perfectly safe to drink, some school officials are taking no chances. They’ve shut off water fountains until they are certain.
Dr. Raoult Ratard, the Louisiana state epidemiologist, says the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 may ultimately be to blame. Low-lying St. Bernard Parish, where the boy who died was infected while playing on a Slip ‘N Slide, was badly hit by the flooding that Katrina caused.
“After Katrina, it almost completely depopulated,” Ratard told NBC News. “You have a lot of vacant lots and a lot of parts of the system where water is sitting there under the sun and not circulating.”
That, says Ratard, provided a perfect opportunity for the amoeba to multiply. Without enough chlorine to kill them, they can spread.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Monday that it had found Naegleria fowleri in St. Bernard’s water supply – the first time it’s ever been found in U.S. tap water. The amoeba likes hot water and thrives in hot springs, warm lakes and rivers.

By April Neale
An innovative two-part series, "Brains on Trial with Alan Alda," airing Wednesday, September 11 and 18, 2013, 10-11 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), explores how the growing ability to separate truth from lies, even decode people’s thoughts and memories, may radically affect how criminal trials are conducted in the future.
As brain scanning techniques advance, their influence in criminal cases is becoming critically important.
Brains on Trial centers around the trial of a fictional crime: a robbery staged in a convenience store that has been filmed by the store’s security cameras. A teenager stands accused of the attempted murder of the store clerk’s wife who was shot during the crime. While the crime is fictional, the trial is conducted before a real federal judge and argued by real practicing attorneys. The program is divided into two-parts: the first hour examines the guilt phase of the trial concluding with the jury’s verdict; the second hour looks at the sentencing phase, when arguments for and against a severe sentence are heard.
As the trial unfolds, Alda visits with neuroscientists whose research has already influenced some Supreme Court decisions, as well as Duke University law professor Nita Farahany, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. On these visits, neuroscientists show how functional MRIs and other brain scanning techniques are exploring lie detection, facial recognition, memory decoding, racial bias, brain maturity, intention, and even emotions. The research Alda discovers is at the center of a controversy as to how this rapidly expanding ability to peer into people’s minds and decode their thoughts and feelings could – or should – affect trials like the one presented in the program. As DNA evidence has played a major role in exonerating innocent prisoners, Brains on Trial asks if neuroscience can make the criminal justice system more just.

By Neuroskeptic
Back in April a paper came out in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that shocked many: Katherine Button et al’s Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience
It didn’t shock me, though, skeptic that I am: I had long suspected that much of neuroscience (and science in general) is underpowered – that is, that our sample sizes are too small to give us an acceptable chance of detecting the signals that we claim to be able to isolate out of the noise.
In fact, I was so unsurprised by Button et al that I didn’t even read it, let alone write about it, even though the authors list included such neuro-blog favorites as John Ionaddis, Marcus Munafo and Brian Nosek (I try to avoid obvious favouritism, you see).
However this week I took a belated look at the paper, and I noticed something interesting.
Button et al took 49 meta-analyses and calculated the median observed statistical power of the studies in each analysis. The headline finding was that average power is small.
I was curious to know why it was small. So I correlated the study characteristics (sample size and observed effect size) with the median power of the studies.
I found that median power in a given meta-analysis was not correlated with the median sample size of those studies (d on the left, RR on the right):

Brain cells talk to each other in a variety of tones. Sometimes they speak loudly but other times struggle to be heard. For many years scientists have asked why and how brain cells change tones so frequently. Today National Institutes of Health researchers showed that brief bursts of chemical energy coming from rapidly moving power plants, called mitochondria, may tune brain cell communication.
“We are very excited about the findings,” said Zu-Hang Sheng, Ph.D., a senior principal investigator and the chief of the Synaptic Functions Section at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). “We may have answered a long-standing, fundamental question about how brain cells communicate with each other in a variety of voice tones.”
The network of nerve cells throughout the body typically controls thoughts, movements and senses by sending thousands of neurotransmitters, or brain chemicals, at communication points made between the cells called synapses. Neurotransmitters are sent from tiny protrusions found on nerve cells, called presynaptic boutons. Boutons are aligned, like beads on a string, on long, thin structures called axons. They help control the strength of the signals sent by regulating the amount and manner that nerve cells release transmitters.
Mitochondria are known as the cell’s power plant because they use oxygen to convert many of the chemicals cells use as food into adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the main energy that powers cells. This energy is essential for nerve cell survival and communication. Previous studies showed that mitochondria can rapidly move along axons, dancing from one bouton to another.

Gregory Gage is being honored as a Champion of Change for his dedication to increasing public engagement in science and science literacy.
Science has a rich history of everyday citizens assisting in great discoveries, and I am honored that our work to encourage amateur neuroscience has been selected by The White House for the Citizen Science Champion of Change award. We know a lot about how our amazing brain works, but there is much, much more that remains to be discovered. In fact, we have no cures and only insufficient treatments for neurological disorder, even though about 1 out of every 5 people will be diagnosed with a brain disease. Change is indeed needed in our nation’s approach to science education to bring more focus on neuroscience.
I am a “DIY” neuroscientist. I co-founded a low-fi company called Backyard Brains with my grad-school labmate, Tim Marzullo. While working on our Ph.D., we would often go out to local public schools to talk about the importance of studying neuroscience. We developed our lesson plans using models and analogies about how the brain works, but what we really wanted to teach the students was “electrophysiology”... as this is truly is how the brain works.
The brain is an electrical organ, and the cells (neurons) communicate with “spikes”: a brief pulse of electricity. In my research at the university, I would record these spikes to learn what the neurons were telling us about how the brain worked. Traditionally, to do experiments with electrophysiology, one needs to be in a Ph.D. program and use expensive equipment (our electrophysiology rig cost $40,000). To make this accessible for our outreach goals, Tim and I set out on a self-imposed engineering challenge: to reduce this equipment down to the basic components, and record a spike for

By George Johnson
The mystery of whether there is a natural resonance between music and our brains, as I mentioned in a post last week, brings up an even deeper question: whether mathematics itself is neurologically innate, giving the mind (or some minds) direct access to the structure of the universe. Thinking about that recently led me back to one of Oliver Sack’s most astonishing essays. It appeared in his collection The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and is about two twins, idiot savants who appeared to have an almost supernatural ability to quickly tell if a number is prime.
Prime numbers are those that cannot be broken down into factors — smaller numbers that can be multiplied together to produce the larger one. They have been described as the atoms of the number system. 11 and 13 are obviously prime while 12 and 14 are not. But with larger numbers our brains are quickly flummoxed. Is 7244985277 prime? I just typed the digits by twitching my fingers along the top row of my keyboard. To test the number by hand I would have to start at the beginning of the number system and begin trying out the possible divisors.
There are shortcuts to avoid testing every single one. We know 2 can’t be a factor since 7244985277, like all primes, is odd. For the same reason we can rule out all even factors. And you only have to test factors up to the square root of a number. (The factors of 100 are 2 x 50, 4 x 25, 5 x 20, and 10 x 10. Testing beyond 10 would be redundant.)